“Lord, give us grace that we, like them the meek and lowly, on high may dwell with Thee.”


Don’t know about you, but I have always been dreadful at getting into a habit of reading my bible and praying. Thank God, therefore, for those magnificent chaps and chapettes over at Scripture Union who assemble the excellent “Encounter With God” notes and thanks for the lovely Guy who gives them to me for free at work! They work for me because they are dated and that clearly taps into some small measure of the obsessive compulsive within me. I can catch up on up to four missed days in a train trip, but if any more than five days go past, I’m pretty much stuffed.

Anyway, today was one of those catch-up-on-three-days-of-devotions days and rarely have I been more grateful for my own neglect of my personal spiritual growth because if I read all of these devotions three days apart, I might never have made the connection that God has prompted me to make this morning.

Firstly, with the fabulous guidance of Rikk Watts, I read what I was meant to read on Saturday, which was Mark 4:35-41 – the story of Jesus calming the sea. Rikk makes the observation that this display of enormous divine power is not for everyone. It isn’t for those who are skeptical about Jesus, it isn’t to precede the arrival of the glorious king. Rather, as Rikk puts it, “this momentary lifting of the veil of Jesus’ humanity is only for those who have already come to trust him on other grounds.” Rikk makes the point that our human reality is shaped by “power and compulsion” leaving “little room for trust and relationship.”
Jesus does not choose to come storming into our world in this first instance demonstrating his cosmic power, rather he comes into the lives of individuals, offering love and earning trust. These disciples don’t learn to relate to him out of fear, rather they come to know him as a friend and then are given a glimpse into the enormity of who he is – the God who can command the sea – “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!” It is a totally different kind of power with which Jesus wins the hearts of his followers. Few of us have become Christians as the result of impressive displays of God’s outrageous power – most have become Christians in unimpressive, and even mundane seeming ways. But our hearts have been won by the one who values love and trust and relationship far above power and might and glory.

THEN, I move on to what I was meant to read yesterday, Psalm 108. But it is prefaced by Alastair Campbell with this challenge: “Examine yourself before reading today. As you think about the challenges facing the church today, are you encouraged or despondent? Bring your feelings to God.” Now I have been at an Anglican church for the last seventeen years and I’m not really sure what’s happening in this denomination in the world right now but I gather that it isn’t really a great place for the Anglican communion to be in. However, after reading about the calming of the storm and reflecting on what it reveals about Jesus, I suddenly found myself reflecting with a great sense of perspective.

Schism has been a reality in the church pretty much since the word go. And as much as schism is a bad thing, I have always concluded that it comes out of a conviction on either side of the fence that the truth can only be protected if the split is made. Now I’m a fairly inexpert commentator on these things, but generally speaking, isn’t God still definitely present and active in both the Eastern and Western branches of the church? Isn’t God present and active in orthodoxy, Protestantism, Catholicism, evangelicalism, the Charismatic movement and the emerging or alternative church? (I realise that lots of those terms cross over in lots of places – which convinces me all the more! I also realise that I’ve probably left lots out but it’s the first day of school holidays and it’s relatively early in the morning.) Ultimately, isn’t it not really such a bad thing that the “power base” of the church begins to crumble a bit? Sure, maybe each church will begin to look even more different to its neighbor church than it does now. But in many ways, aren’t schisms a funny way for God to work out his grace in the world? In His provision, there are a great variety of churches all over the world where individuals can find a spiritual home and encounter Christ. Maybe their bible knowledge doesn’t end up being as awesome, maybe they have some funny ideas about baptism, maybe they’re not very energetic about evangelism, maybe they like to sing, maybe they don’t etc etc. But by God’s grace he saves people from all kinds of situations and provides Christian family and food. So do we really have to worry about it? Perhaps what it leads to is what we see in Jesus calming the storm. Those great and powerful and cosmic acts are really for the benefit of those of us who have come into relationship with him through relatively meek and unimpressive processes. Jesus doesn’t seek to impress the world with the church, though it would be nice if we even actually thought of ourselves as a “we”. Seeing as we don’t, all we can do is make the smaller communities of which we are a part, welcoming, non-judgmental, loving places, characterised by the reality that we are all sinners saved from ourselves and from the fate that we deserve. I guess there is more to church politics than that but I clearly don’t get it…

In all that I don’t mean to say that I have any particularly well-formed opinion of this whole GAFCON thing nor do I really claim to have much of an idea of what the issues really are and what the outcome might be. I don’t know whether the issues at hand warrant a split in the Anglican communion or not, but I’m just saying, if they do, or even if they don’t, surely the church will be, and always has been, in the hands of God Himself.

Anyway, I felt inspired to sing a bit of a hymn after all of this and so I scrolled through my collection of worship songs and discovered that they’re mostly pretty much about me and my personal relationship with God – good for lots of occasions, but I felt like singing about the church. Anyway, I dug out my good ole Presbyterian “The Psalms and Church Hymnary”, which is pretty old, and looked up “The Church: The Communion of Saints” in the index. First hymn I found? The one I most want to sing:

The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord:
She is His new creation
By water and the word;
From heaven he came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood he bought her,
And for her life he died.

Elect from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth,
Her charter of salvation
One Lord, one faith, one birth:
One holy name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.

Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed,
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
The cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song.

‘Mid toil and tribulation,
And tumult of her war,
She waits the consummation
Of peace forever more,
Till with the vision glorious
Her longing eyes are blest,
And the great Church victorious
Shall be the Church at rest.

Yet she on earth hath union
With God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won.
O happy ones and holy!
Lord give us grace that we,
Like them the meek and lowly,
On high may dwell with Thee.

Samuel John Stone
1839-1900


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